National statistics

English Housing Survey, 2019 to 2020: feeling safe from fire - technical notes

Published 8 July 2021

Applies to England

National Statistics status

National Statistics status means that our statistics meet the highest standards of trustworthiness, quality and public value as set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics. It is the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government’s statisticians’ responsibility to maintain compliance with these standards.

The designation of these statistics as National Statistics was first confirmed in April 2011 following an assessment by the UK Statistics Authority.

Data collection

A full account of English Housing Survey data collection procedures can be found in the Technical Report, which is published annually.

In summary, The EHS has two components, an interview survey undertaken with approximately 13,300 households each year and a physical inspection of a random sample of the dwellings of about 6,000 of the households included in the interview survey. The physical inspection also includes a random sample of about 200 dwellings in the sample found to be vacant at the time of the interview survey. The interview surveys are conducted by trained interviewers and the physical surveys are carried out by qualified surveyors. Data collection on the EHS operates continuously over all four quarters of the year.

Results in this statistical release, are presented for ‘2019-20’ and are based on surveys conducted between April 2019 and March 2020. In order to cover a wider range of questions, some questions were asked of half of the responding sample in 2019 to 2020, including questions about how safe people felt from the threat of fire in their homes. This represents a sample of 6,761 households, referred to in the release as the half household sample.

Data quality

A full account of data quality procedures followed to collect and analyse English Housing Survey data can be found in the Quality Report, which is published annually.

The reliability of the results of sample surveys, including the English Housing Survey, is positively related to the unweighted sample size. Results based on small sample sizes should therefore be treated as indicative only because inference about the national picture cannot be drawn. To alert readers to those results, percentages based on a row or column total with unweighted total sample size of less than 30 are italicised. To safeguard against data disclosure, the cell contents of cells where the cell count is less than 5 are replaced with a “u”.

Where comparative statements have been made in the text, these have been significance tested to a 95% confidence level. This means we are 95% confident that the statements we are making are true.

Definitions

The population or key units of interest of the EHS are residential households and dwellings in England. A dwelling is defined as a unit of accommodation where all the rooms and amenities are for the exclusive use of the household(s) occupying them. The EHS collects information about the respondents’ main home so it defines a household as one person or a group of people (not necessarily related) who have the accommodation as their only or main residence, and (for a group) share cooking facilities and share a living room or sitting room or dining area. This definition is slightly different from the definition used in the 2011 Census^{[footnote 1]}.

Further details about the terms used in this publication can be found in the Housing statistics and English Housing Survey glossary published by MHCLG.

Accompanying tables

Accompanying tables are available alongside this release in the Feeling safe from fire data spreadsheet. These are:

Table 1 Feeling safe from fire, by tenure Table 2 Feeling safe from fire, by dwelling type Table 3 Feeling safe from fire, by age Table 4 Feeling safe from fire, by ethnicity

Related statistics

Further information and releases from the English Housing Survey can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/english-housing-survey

Enquiries

Media enquiries:

Email: newsdesk@communities.gov.uk

Public enquiries:

Phone: 0303 444 1209 Email: EHS@communities.gov.uk

1. Unlike the EHS, the 2011 Census’ definition of a household did not require household members to have the accommodation as their only or main residence. So the 2011 Census defined a household as one person living alone, or a group of people (not necessarily related) living at the same address who shared cooking facilities and shared a living room or sitting room or dining area. ↩